digitalGREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

INTRODUCTION
Digital Green started as an idea that became a research
project that was evaluated and then extended and now is
scaling up!
In Mahabubnagar, Andhra Pradesh, eleven women from
the nearby area got introduced to filmmaking for the first
time. In two and a half days, these women were developing storyboards, shooting videos in the field, editing them
on a computer, and sharing tips to make them better.
That training program marked the beginning of our partnership with the Government of India's National Rural
Livelihoods
Mission, one of the world's largest poverty reduction initiatives, in which we will be looking to connect with over one
million farmers across 10,000 villages over the next three
years.

Together with our partners, we're working to help build

and support the aspirations that individuals seek to
achieve. Our network of team members and partners has
developed our capabilities considerably over the last
three years. Seven NGO partners now work with us in
over 900 villages across 6 states in India and have
produced over 1,500 videos that have been screened to
over 60,000 farmers. All these videos are available
online on the Digital Green Repository on YouTube.
In a rough assessment in Orissa, we found that the costeffectiveness of two of our partners' existing interventions
increased by a factor of 4-5x and had resulted in gains
of around US$ 242 per farmer in the first year of our
work together.
We're humbled to see that sort of impact and plan to
work with Innovations for Poverty Action for a more rigorous assessment. We also continue to capture, analyse, and
share data on the progress we've made on our analytics
dashboards.
DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

6
7
900
1,500
45,000
60,000

STATES
PARTNERS
VILLAGES
VIDEOS
SCREENINGS
FARMERS

We're iterating our standard operating procedures

based on the learnings and challenges that we're encountering in the field and have drafted a broader framework
for ensuring quality as we go to scale. As we work with the
Government of India's Ministry of Rural Development and
others, we'll be leveraging the platform to integrate initiatives in public health and nutrition and primary school
education.
We're also in the process of extending to other parts of
South Asia and East Africa through franchisees who are
committed and able to drive the model forward. As you
can imagine, our team and board is growing. We're
looking for a few good men and women to join us as we
accelerate our scaling up in India and beyond.

For more, visit

www.digitalgreen.org

DIGITALGREEN.ORG | 1

CONTENTS
4

1. PROGRESS
2. LEARNINGS AND CHALLENGES
2.1 Partnership Management

2.2 Impact

2.3 Quality Assurance

2.4 Sustainability

3. TECHNOLOGY
3.1 Wonder Village

12

3.2 Analytics

13

4. PEOPLE
4.1 Partners

16

4.2 Team

17

4.3 Board

18

4.4 Investors

18

5. MORE

DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

5.1 Connect

20

5.2 Financials

21

DIGITALGREEN.ORG | 3

1. PROGRESS
Digital Green has primarily scaled by building on its partnerships with seven non-governmental organizations namely, PRADAN, BAIF, Samaj Pragati Sahayog, ACCESS,
Action for Social Advancement, PRAGATI, and VARRAT and recently began a partnership with the Government of
India's National Rural Livelihoods Mission. These partnerships were established after a comprehensive due
diligence process. Sub agreements then were finalized in
which mechanisms for cost effectiveness, and quality
assurance were emphasized.
Digital Green has regional offices in Bangalore, Bhopal,
Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad and New Delhi to provide the
necessary technology development and resource agency
support to each partner. The Digital Green system now
involves 58,902 farmers across Andhra Pradesh, Bihar,
Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Orissa.
Supporting these activities, the Digital Green team
includes 22 core team members, 102 partner staff, and
524 community intermediaries.
An internal team has been established to refine our training programs to advance the capabilities of the community intermediaries involved in producing videos, mediating video screenings, and capturing farmer level feedback to sustain participation and adoption levels over
time.
With quality assurance; in a preliminary assessment with
two partners, PRADAN and VARRAT, in Orissa, we found
that the classical extension systems that these NGOs oper-

1,500

VIDEOS PRODUCED

45,000

VIDEO SCREENINGS
FARMER ADOPTIONS

ated had a cost per adoption of US$ 10-18 whereas the

Digital Green model had a cost per adoption of US$ 3-4.
Additionally, a very preliminary, limited sample analysis
found that in the first 8 months in which the Digital Green
system had been deployed resulted in an average cumulative increase in incomes of US$ 242 per farmer in one
cluster of villages in Orissa. We have planned a more
rigorous evaluation both internally as well as in collaboration with researchers from Innovations for Poverty Action,
Yale University, and University of California, Berkeley
using multi-intervention controlled trial methods for the
next phase of our work.
We continue to iteratively develop our standard operating procedures (SOPs) framework based on the learnings
and experiences. The SOPs essentially frame the technology and social organizational components of the Digital
Green system - from topic identification to video production to dissemination to feedback analysis - which ensure
coherence and consistency in the processes and outcomes
of the model. We have also refined our backend technology stack to better capture and analyze progress data
and farmer feedback from areas that have limited to no
electricity and Internet connectivity through paper-,
phone-, and web-based channels.
We have identified four areas in our work that require
particular focus: partnership management, impact assessment, quality assurance, and sustainability. We have also
recently expanded our board of directors.

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LEARNINGS AND CHALLENGES

DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

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2.1 PARTNERSHIP MANAGEMENT

Partnership remains fundamental to Digital Green's approach which builds upon the foundation of
our collaborators.

Locally relevant
domain expertise

Established
extension
operations

We continue to build on these collaborations over time.

This has included mechanisms to strengthen the operational
and financial management of these partnerships as well
as the sharing of learnings, challenges, and content across
partners at state-, regional-, and national-levels. Many of
our partners, for example, work in proximate locations to
one another and these processes have proven worthwhile
to clarify and resolve issues in a collaborative manner as
well as to explore institutional synergies that might extend
beyond the immediate project.
Further, we purposefully selected a variety of partners
with differing expertise and scale to facilitate a richer
exchange.
We are expanding the type of partners that we work with
through collaborations with private agribusiness (Godrej
Agrovet), government (Government of India's Ministry of
Rural Development), and agricultural research organizations (International Rice Research Institute).

Cereal System Initiative of South Asia

6 | DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

Community-level
trust networks

We are keen to explore opportunities to converge these

partnerships in focused geographies to use our entry point
of extension to link aspects across the value chain (e.g.
inputs, production, aggregation, market linkages, government schemes) to improve the socioeconomic well being of
farming communities in a sustainable manner.
To support this aim, we plan to partner with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the second phase of
the Cereal System Initiative South Asia (CSISA) as well as
a possible project on improving rice-based rain fed
agricultural systems in Bihar, India that would build upon
the work of the Stress-Tolerant Rice for Africa and South
Asia (STRASA) project with a focus on agronomy and
agricultural extension.

International Rice Research Institute

Government of India
Ministry of Rural Development
DIGITALGREEN.ORG

2.2 IMPACT

Madhya Pradesh
October 2009
PRADAN, SPS, ACCESS, ASA
25,222 FARMERS
791
VIDEOS
16,216 SCREENINGS
17,104 ADOPTIONS

Karnataka
September 2009
BAIF
18,196 FARMERS
264
VIDEOS
12,270 SCREENINGS
1,927 ADOPTIONS

Orissa
May 2009
PRADAN, PRAGATI, VARRAT
1,3415 FARMERS
310
VIDEOS
12,883 SCREENINGS
15,351 ADOPTIONS

9,810
4,766
299
15,244

13,448

Bihar
January 2011
ASA
1,045 FARMERS
VIDEOS
17
332 SCREENINGS
143 ADOPTIONS

Jharkhand
May 2009
PRADAN
3925 FARMERS
180 VIDEOS
3,543 SCREENINGS
2,177 ADOPTIONS

10,360

Andhra Pradesh
August 2011
SERP
20 FARMERS
4 VIDEOS

107
3,775

DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

1,045

20

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2.3 QUALITY ASSURANCE

As the Digital Green system scales, we are proactively committed to maintaining quality both in terms of (1) the efficiency
of the extension system, which includes the production and dissemination of locally relevant content, as well as (2) its
impact, which includes the increased uptake of modern sustainable agricultural practices and the ultimate sustainable
improvement in the socioeconomic status and self-efficacy of the communities that we work with.

Standard
Operating
Procedures

Supportive
Supervision

Village
Certification

PROCESS QUALITY
Review
and
Audit

Partner
Due
Diligence

Data
Management
System

Site Visits

Participatory
Research

Monthly
Reviews

Impact

Improved Livelihoods
and Empowerment

To support these protocols, we will establish a directorate

of quality assurance to anchor these processes and to
coordinate exchanges and learnings across the organization. The directorate will also work with Digital Green's
partners and create supportive structures to manage the
process quality and content quality assurance mechanisms.
For instance, a technical advisory panel of experts will be
constituted to provide input into assessing and documenting the quality of content and assuring the ultimate impact
that we seek to make in improving livelihoods and empowering the community.

8 | DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

Technical
Advisory
Panel

Scientific
Reference
and Farmer
Feedback

Efficiency
Process quality ensures that the
aspects of the Digital Green system
are institutionalized with the partners
and communities that we work with
in a consistent and coherent manner
to improve the efficiency of existing
extension systems.

CONTENT QUALITY

Content quality ensures that the

information exchanged across Digital
Green provides sustained, positive
value for the members of the communities that adopt improved practices
and technologies for themselves.

Digital Green captures a variety of process, output, and

outcome metrics that are both qualitative and quantitative
in nature. This data is captured, analyzed, and shared
across our technology stack: our online/offline data
management framework, analytics suite of dashboards,
videos library, and public website. To ensure the quality
of this data, our technology stack provides automated
consistency checking functionalityare used for crossvalidation in the field. Technical dimensions of produced
videos and mediated instruction of video disseminations
are assessed through checklists and surveys.

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2.4 SUSTAINABILITY
Extension services for smallholder farmers should primarily be considered a public good and we expect our
collaboration with government extension systems to
provide an opportunity for both scale and sustainability.
Still, we believe it is important that the community take
ownership of the system to drive its relevance and value.
Concretely, our objective is to have the recurring costs of
the system supported by the community over time. We
have experimented with a variety of modes for financial
sustainability over the last two years.
Initially, we used individual usage fees (e.g., US$ 0.040.08 per farmer per screening). We found that such
ticket-based models led individuals to take unanticipated
actions: maximizing the number of videos shown in a single
screening, attending only those videos screenings that
offered an immediate, tangible economic return, etc. To
mitigate these effects, we explored usage fees that were

designed as an annual or semi-annual subscription with

our partners. To make further progress on sustainability,
we will focus on two aspects:
(1) Ensuring a positive value proposition for the community
(2) Productizing our service. Our initiatives in quality
assurance and impact assessment will directly determine
the value that farmers realize primarily based on: (a)
quality of videos, (b) quality of dissemination and (c)
cost-benefit of the practices in the local context.
We are also evaluating the possibility of flipping our
model of having farmers subscribe or pay membership
fees to cover the recurring costs of the system (mainly, the
service provider's compensation) and instead have the
community pay to purchase the access device (i.e., the
pico projector) and have the community mediators
services be provided for "free".

TOP VIDEOS
Most Adopted: Mandala Chasa

Most Screened: Lime Water feeding

Pragati, Orissa - Oriya

BAIF, Karnataka - Kannada

90
Number of adoptions

Number of screenings

80

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun

Jul

Aug Sep
2011

Sep Oct Nov Dec

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun

Farmers Questions
Can I use this practice during monsoons?

Farmers Questions
What would be the cost of this entire setup?

Can all cows be fed lime water?

Can this be practiced on a commercial scale?

-Gowramma| Mysore, Karnataka

-Pushpa | Mysore, Karnataka

DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

Jul

2010-11

-Jambati Kuldip| Koraput, Orrisa

-Kamala Gadaba | Koraput, Orrisa

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TECHNOLOGY
DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

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3.1 WONDER VILLAGE

Digital Green's technology stack is primarily geared
toward operationalizing our work with partners and
communities in the field. At the same time, progress monitoring tools, like our analytics dashboards, are accessible
via our website to the general public.
Recently, we began to see how our core work in the field
might connect with other audiences who could learn and
engage with the issues of agriculture and rural development. To this end, our technology team developed a social
game, called Wonder Village, which was launched on
Facebook.

Through the game, players set up a simulated village

economy and have opportunities to relate with the actual
farmers that we work with in the field.
Players are placed in a resource-constrained setting and
pursue quests like setting up small farms of paddy and
maize and supplying raw materials to farmers' markets.
The game follows a so-called "freemium" model which
allows users to play for free and allows users to purchase
virtual currency to advance more quickly.
apps.facebook.com/wondervillage

VILLAGE GURUS

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3.2 ANALYTICS
COCO, Connect Online | Connect Offline
COCO is a highly sophisticated data input system that
forms the base of Digital Green's software stack. The
creation of this system was inspired by persistent and at
times debilitating issues at the field level, specifically
technical issues in gathering and storing information. To
alleviate these problems, Digital Green's software team
conceived of a highly flexible and robust alternative that
sought to make information gathering and input at Digital
Green less error prone, fast, and resilient to persistent
data connectivity issues in remote locations.

Analytics
Our Analytics dashboards form the second layer on the
Digital Green software stack. Built on the COCO foundation, the Analytics System provides day-to-day business
intelligence on field operations, performance targets, and
basic ROI metrics relevant to the organization. The system
is freely available and accessible online without the need
of onerous technical infrastructure and expensive commercial licenses.
analytics.digitalgreen.org

Most applicable to NGOs with a sizeable field operation, COCO's singular unique selling proposition is the
ability to take the application offline in low and limited
bandwidth locations, with uninterrupted usage in the
browser. COCO is designed to support up to 100,000
users located anywhere in the world and only requires
internet connectivity whenever a user is ready to
synchronize their data with our global repository. Built
as a robust standalone application in the Internet
browser, COCO requires no additional software installation or maintenance. The system is designed so that
can be deployed without the need of IT/engineering
staff.

Video Repository
All videos created by communities within the Digital
Green programme are freely accessible online via our
video search page. Videos can be searched by geography, seasonality, language, practices etc. Along with the
video itself, visitors can find out where and when the
video was produced, how many farmers has it been seen
by and how many farmers have adopted the practices
demonstrated in that video.
www.digitalgreen.org/analytics/video_search

Number of videos produced

DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

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PEOPLE
DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

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4.1 PARTNERS
Executive
ACCESS works in the areas of
livelihood and microfinance
development in six Indian states.

Action for Social Advancement is

working with 120,000 families
across 1,000 villages in 15
districts of Madhya Pradesh and
Bihar.

BAIF works in 47,000 villages in

12 states in India focused on the
areas of livestock and land
resource development.

PRAGATI works in the areas of soil

and water conservation, promotion
of sustainable agriculture and
introduction of new crop production technologies.

PRADAN promotes self-help

groups, develops locally suitable
economic activities, and introduces
systems to improve livelihoods.

Samaj Pragati Sahayog ensures

water and livelihood security for
the tribal communities living in
backward districts.

Society for Elimination of Rural

Poverty is an autonomous society of
Department of Rural Development,
Government of Andhra Pradesh.

VARRAT is working in the area of

livelihood and rural development
to empower village communities to
enable their sustainability.

D-Rev is working to build an

affordable device that will enable
farmers' ready access to suitable
and value-adding agricultural
practices.

GREEN Foundation focuses on the

conservation of indigenous seed
varieties and promote sustainable
agricultural practices based in
Karnataka.

Microsoft's team incubated the

Digital Green project as a pilot
initiative that evolved from a
research exploration into a spinoff, non-profit organization.

Digital Study Hall uses innovative

approaches to improve education
for the poor children in slum and
rural schools in India.

University of California, Berkeley

works with us to conduct a randomized controlled trial evaluation of
the Digital Green system as its
operations are extended to scale.

Awaaz.De is a voice-based question and answer service, information portal, forum, asynchronous
call center and narrow-cast radio
platform.

Research

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4.2 OUR TEAM

Rikin Gandhi

Chief Executive Officer

Akbar Gulzar

Vinay Kumar

Saureen Shah

Chief Operating Officer

Chief Technology Officer

S. B. Nadagouda

Praveen Sriramshetty

Avinash Upadhyay

Reg. Program Coordinator

Abhishek Hegde

Reg. Program Coordinator

Shabnam Aggarwal
Program Manager

Development Manager

Development Manager

Senior Program Manager

Aruna Katragadda Gali

Shreya Aggarwal

Chandra Shekhar

Satyam Salil

K Archana

Rahul Agrawal

Nandini Bhardwaj

Sreenivasula Reddy

Program Manager

Program Manager

Rashmi Kanthi

Sudha Jha

Asst. Development Manager

Asst. Development Manager

Asst. Development Manager

Systems Engineer

Program Manager

Shivaji Choudhary

Asst. Development Manager

Systems Engineer

Asst. Development Manager

Asst. Systems Engineer

Our hiring bar is unabashedly high, and we insist on keeping

our team size small. This means the person occupying each and
every spot must be among the most gifted in his or her field.
Debika Goswami

Operations Executive

Akhilesh Soni

Administrative Executive

DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

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4.3 BOARD MEMBERS

G.N.S Reddy

Kentaro Toyama

Vice President,
BAIF Research Development Foundation

Visiting Senior Researcher,

School of Information
University of California, Berkeley

Indrani Medhi

Rajesh Veeraraghavan

Associate Researcher,
Microsoft Research India

Tejesh Shah

Doctoral Candidate,
School of Information
University of California, Berkeley

Melissa Ho

Director,
Topos Developers

Specialist in Agricultural Policy,

U.S. Congress

Vanaja Ramprasad

Aishwarya Ratan

Founder and Director,

GREEN Foundation

Director,
Microsavings and Payments
Innovation Initiative,
Yale University

Srikant Vasan

Entrepreneur-in-Residence,
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

4.4 INVESTORS

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people

lead healthy, productive lives.
In developing countries, it
focuses on improving peoples
health and giving them the
chance to lift themselves out
of hunger and extreme
poverty.

Deshpande Foundation has

established a "sandbox" in
the northwestern region of
Karnataka state to promote
innovation and organizational collaboration which
supports Digital Green's work
there.

18 | DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

Ford Foundation supports

Digital Green's efforts to
engage policy makers and
the broader public in bringing systemic change to the
agriculture sector.

The Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India, is

entrusted with the task of
accelerating
socioeconomic
development of rural India. Its
focus is on areas like agricultural productivity, sanitation
solutions, employment generation, food security etc.

DIGITALGREEN.ORG

MORE
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5.1 CONNECT

Central India Office

TH-27, Akash Ganga,
E-8, Arera Colony,
Bhopal - 462039
Madhya Pradesh
+91-755-4078142

Head Office
K-2, Second Floor,
Green Park Main
New Delhi - 110016
Delhi
+91-11-41881037/38

Eastern India Office

Plot No- N3/18, Ranjita Apartments
Flat No-401, IRC Village,
Bhubaneswar - 751015
Odisha
+91-674-326693
Southern India Office (Regd)
Flat No. T4, 4th Floor,
#33 Race Course Road,
Swiss Complex,
Bangalore - 560001
Karnataka
+91-80-65834524

Digital Green Foundation

2342 Shattuck Ave., #151
Berkeley, CA 94704
USA

twitter.com/digitalgreenorg
facebook.com/digitalgreenorg

20 | DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-11

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5.2 FINANCIALS

US
$138,861

U.S.A
$ 138,861

INDIA
$ 753,184
India

$756,184

Digital Green's chartered accountants and auditors in the

tioned from an embedded approach in which our

U.S. and India have developed a robust financial manage-

team operated from the field offices of our partners

ment system that defines how we maintain and administer

to a hub-and-spoke model in which our team operates

our accounts within and between the countries in which we

from regional offices and provides training and back-

operate. Digital Green, as an organization, has transi-

stopping support to our partners through regular field

visits.

Sub-Grants: 36%

Indirect Costs: 7%

Fringe Benefits: 4%
Equipment: 4%
Travel: 2%
Personnel: 43%

DIGITAL GREEN ANNUAL REPORT 2010-211

Consultants: 2%
Contracted: 2%

DIGITALGREEN.ORG | 21

www.digitalgreen.org